The next time you’re wandering about the food court at Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI), rest assured the operators of the Dunkin Donuts’ store there have an attendance policy that respects disabled employees’ rights.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced today it has settled an Americans With Disabilities Act lawsuit against OHM Concessions Group LLC-the stores’ operator–for $151,000 stemming from its firing of a regional manager who was seeking additional time off to treat her breast cancer.

The lawsuit alleged that after Joan McMahon O’Donnell was diagnosed with breast cancer and requested unpaid leave for surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment, Dunkin’ Donuts refused to provide a reasonable accommodation and instead abruptly discharged her because of her disability.

With the lawsuit out of the way, OHM can re-direct its energies toward ADA compliance. Under the terms of the agreement, this includes implementing a new attendance policy which includes a provision for requesting reasonable accommodations for employees with disabilities. The restaurant will provide annual ADA training to all supervisors, managers and human resources employees. OHM will also post a notice about the settlement and will report to EEOC about how it handled any internal complaints of alleged disability discrimination.

“Providing a leave of absence for an employee who needs medical treatment related to a disability is not only the decent thing to do – it is required by federal law unless the employer can show it would pose an undue hardship,” said EEOC Philadelphia District Director Spencer H. Lewis, Jr.

AutoZone cannot limit the scope of an Americans With Disabilities Act lawsuit to just three of its retail stores, but instead will have to defend against the alleged ADA violation at all of its stores, a federal district court ruled on Nov. 6.

The case centers on the auto parts company’s alleged policy of assessing employees attendance “points” for absences, without permitting any general exception for disability-related absences. In a lawsuit filed against the company in 2014, the EEOC alleged that the policy, at least from 2009 to 2011, caused the firing of qualified employees with disabilities with even modest numbers of disability-related absence, in violation of Title I of the ADA.

The district court rejected the company’s argument that EEOC did not conduct an adequate, “nationwide” investigation prior to filing suit. The company requested that the suit be limited to just three of the company’s many retail stores as a result. According to its website, the company operates several thousand stores in 48 states and Puerto Rico.

“[T]he Court may not inquire into the sufficiency of the EEOC’s pre-suit investigation in order to ‘limit’ the scope of the litigation,” the court stated in its order, which was written by U.S. District Judge Robert M. Dow, Jr. The order also cited the recent decision in Mach Mining, LLC v. EEOC, in which the Supreme Court stated that courts should not impose additional procedural requirements on such litigation beyond those established by Congress. The order explained, “this Court would be imposing extra procedural requirements if it required the EEOC to offer additional proof that ‘its investigation was … conducted on a nationwide basis.”

It’ll cost a landscaping company in Fort Myers, Fla., $7,500 to settle allegations it discriminated against work-authorized non-U.S. citizens in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Nov. 23.

DOJ said that its of investigation of Sunny Grove Landscaping & Nursery Inc. (Sunny Grove) found that Sunny Grove discriminated against lawful permanent residents by requiring them to produce permanent resident cards to prove their work authorization, whereas U.S. citizens were permitted to choose whatever valid documentation they wanted to prove their work authorization.

Lawful permanent residents do not have to show their permanent resident cards when they start working, DOJ reminds employers. Like all workers, they can choose whatever valid documentation they want to establish their employment authorization, and many lawful permanent residents have the same work authorization documents as U.S. citizens.

Just last week McDonald’s USA LLP and its corporate affiliates and subsidiaries settled DOJ allegations putting an end to the company’s “long standing practice” of requiring lawful permanent residents to show a new permanent resident card when their original document expires

We have many things to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day, but unfortunately widespread access to paid family and medical leave isn’t one of them.

Only three states have paid family and medical leave laws, and some companies have adopted them. But the “United States’ lack of a national paid family medical leave program makes it an extreme outlier among all other advanced economies, according to a report issued last week by the Center for American Progress based in Washington, D.C.

We should look beyond our shores for answers, says the report, says the November 19 report, titled Administering Paid Family and Medical Leave, Learning from Domestic and International Examples.

While the United States lags behind the rest of the world on the issue of paid leave, there is no compelling reason why it couldn’t create a national paid family and medical leave program, the report says, citing examples and best practices from other countries that the United States can draw upon to develop and implement paid leave. The report outlines the three broad types of structures for ensuring access to paid leave that have been used by states and other countries, and explains how they could function in the U.S.

Those three structures are:

Employer requirement programs, in which businesses are responsible for providing paid leave;

Social insurance programs, in which risk and resources are pooled to provide a fund for wage replacement during leave;

Publicly funded programs, in which government resources are utilized to provide workers with paid leave.

And speaking of money, Aramark, a federal contractor in Lubbock, Texas that provide its services and products to multiple federal departments and agencies, including much of the Defense Department, will pay $165,000 in backpay and benefits to settle systemic hiring discrimination claims.

The victims of this discrimination were 335 male and African-American applicants, the U.S. Department of Labor’s announcement of the settlement said.

Under the agreement, Aramark will pay $165,000 in back wages, interest, and benefits to the affected class members. The company, while not admitting liability, will also make 53 job offers to original applicants as positions become available. Finally, the company will review and revise its selection process and provide better training to its hiring managers to eliminate practices that result in gender and race stereotyping.

“There are no such things as ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work.’ There is only work, and federal contractors are well aware of their obligation to provide equal opportunities to all employees and job applicants,” said OFCCP Director Patricia Shiu. “This settlement is a reminder that it is up to the employee or job applicant to decide which positions to pursue, whatever their reasons. A contractor may only evaluate whether or not an individual has the ability to do the job.”

Employers shelled out collectively more than $525 million to victims of employment discrimination in fiscal year 2015 in the private and public sectors, in actions initiated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency said in its annual Performance and Accountability Report published last Thursday, Nov. 19.

Anyway you slice the data, it’s an impressive haul.

More than half of that amount-$356.6 million-was obtained through mediation, conciliation, and settlements; $65.3 million was obtained for charging parties through litigation; and $105.7 million was obtained for federal employees and applicants.

In fiscal year 2015, EEOC resolved 268 systemic investigations before filing litigation, obtaining more than $33.5 million in remedies. In litigation, EEOC resolved 26 systemic cases, six of which included at least 50 victims of discrimination and 13 that included at least 20 victims.

Private sector employers can learn what not to do in their hiring practices rom companies that have federal contracts. In this case it’s not to steer women into lower-paying jobs while reserving the better paying jobs for men.

That’s what federal contractor G&K Services Inc. did, the U.S. Department of Labor charged, announcing it has recovered $1.8 million for 444 female employees in laborer positions. According to the DOL’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which enforces the rules for nondiscrimination in federal contracts, the company disproportionately assigned the women to lower paying job duties while filling the higher paying job duties predominantly with men, even though female employees were qualified for and able to perform the higher paying jobs.

This unlawful steering of women into the lower paying “light duty” jobs led to unlawful sex-based pay discrimination at G&K facilities in Denver; Sacramento, California; Graham and Charlotte, North Carolina; Pleasant Hill, Iowa; Justice, Illinois; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Houston and Coppell, Texas. This practice also resulted in a lower hiring rate for 2,327 male applicants who were equally or more qualified for general laborer positions at the Sacramento, Pleasant Hill, Justice, St. Paul and Coppell locations, the OFCCP found.

OFCCP also found that G&K failed to provide equal opportunity to 456 African American and 111 Caucasian applicants at its Houston and Charlotte locations when hiring for general laborer positions.